[CLUG] Lookin' for a second-hand box...

[adam beecher]

Paul Collins said:

> Those timeouts would apply to calls triggered by outgoing connections.
>
Arse.

Adam Lock said:

> Use SSH. OpenBSD ships with OpenSSH.
>
I was about to say "It doesn't matter, cos I'll only be accessing it from the
LAN anyway", but that doesn't make any sense does it? Well, it does, since
there's no fear of my passwords being sniffed or anything, but still, best to
leave telnet turned off. Fair point, well made. :)

> I mean for outgoing connections. Diald let's you set different timeouts
> for different ports. For example to make the connection to stay up for
> five minutes for web surfing but to drop immediately when a cron job
> fetches mail. I haven't delved in OpenBSD's ppp (I'm still looking for
> a cheap modem), but comments for users suggest it can't be tweaked
> in such a way. Basically you can set the ppp timeout but it covers
> all ports.
>
That's a bit of a bugger innit? I was hoping to set it up to dial in every day
just after 6pm, and disconnect just before 8am, with periodic pings to keep the
connection alive and - might as well kill two birds with one stone - check
services on my remote machines. 'Cept for weekends of course, when I'd leave it
on the whole time. And, as you suggested, I wanted to collect my email
periodically during the day and drop the connection immediately. If I can't do
that, it would defeat the  the advantage of using OpenBSD in the first place. So
is there no way around this? Isn't there another dialler that could be installed
on the machine?

BTW, somebody mentioned Mr. Modem's - I have an external Mr. Modem and I find it
quite good, but with two rather annoying disadvantages. Both of them, it should
be said, apparently Windows bugs (I rebuilt Linux on this machine a while back
and I haven't set up ppp on it yet), so if you're not dual-booting, you can skip
this. First of all, it has difficulty dialling more than three times in a row in
a short space of time - which of course is pretty annoying with Irish ISP's. And
secondly, there's a serious conflict with Logitech Mouseware - you can't run
both at the same time. Apparently you can fix it by hacking the registry - the
problem is with Mouseware scanning all ports at boot time - but I could never
figure it out. So get used to using two buttons if you have a Logitech mouse.

> The CD layout is copyright so you can't copy it (legally) though there
>
That's a bit crap isn't it? Doesn't really say Open Source to me. Bloody BSD
licences.

> are ISO's on the Internet if you look for them. I found it easier just
> to download the stuff I needed from the
> ftp://ftp.esat.net/mirrors/ftp.openbsd.org mirror and cut my own CD from
> that. You can get a working OpenBSD by downloading about 50Mb of stuff.
>
Cool. I'm sure I can find someone to burn it for me though. Most of my friends
are bad, BAD boys... :)

adam